First we need to go back a couple of years to understand where printing has come from – let’s go back to 1873. That’s about 50 years after Talbot and Daguerre invented photography and 25 years after Archer and Le Gray defined the collodion process. Imagine what people had to do to make a print, it’s 30 degrees Celsius and your (light-tight) covered wagon is deep in the desert. You’ve mixed your collodion plate, loaded it into your camera, you’ve selected, composed and exposed your plate and you now need to process it before the collodion sets. Did I mention that you had under 10 minutes to accomplish this or nothing would turn out. Hit and miss, it took and enormous effort just to get one copy (print) and that is all you ever had – if that. If you wanted another one you would repeat the entire process because back in the day, the photographer was also the lab and in the beginning the lab had to travel with the photographer.

It’s now 2017 and we’ve moved way beyond collodion. We still have chemical prints – made on Kodak Endura paper which are excellent . Chemical prints are a long lasting, colourful, cost effective way of displaying and preserving your images. Not to mention that the process is repeatable, consistent and as far as the photographer is concerned – painless.

The Lab Works has been delivering the highest quality prints and we’ve been doing it since 88 (that’s nineteen eighty eight). We were the leaders in the analog world and have continued that tradition delivering the finest digital chemical prints possible. We now bring that commitment to excellence to Fine Art Printing.

So, why Fine Art?
Fine art prints are made using a different process – an inkjet printer with special inks and special papers. But it’s much more than that as Fine Art Printing gives a name to the process of delivering the highest fidelity prints from your digital files. There are four key benefits of Fine Art Printing:

Visit The Lab Works or any Don’s Photo location to say hi or to check out the new papers. Order your prints through ROES. We accept 8 bit, RGB, tiff or jpeg files and you can leave the covered wagon at home.

17

We love to document our lives and post them online. The digital world has made it easy to share pictures to family and friends via Social media, email, texting. But what happen to those pictures after they’re seen behind the screen? They’re often forgotten and sometimes even lost. With this in mind we have put together a few reasons why printing is important:

1. Not everyone is on social media – Yes, the digital world made it easier to share your memories but not everyone is online. As much as we love social media, there are people who rather enjoy face to face conversations instead of online. Even those you know on Facebook aren’t always online to see those new posts. Also, special people in your life like grandma and grandpa would be delighted to receive pictures in the mail!

2. Hard drives fail – Technology has helped us in so many ways. One of them is how it has allowed us to store data in one small pocket hard drive. But where there is pro, there is con. Let’s face it, hard drives fail, computer virus’s happen, even backups fail. Once you lose what you store in your hard drive or your computer, they’re gone. Forever. The advantage with printing is even when hard drives fail, your picture remain alive.

3. They are a conversation starter – Family gatherings? Catching up with friends? When your prints are on the table, one of your guests will take that album on the coffee table and someone will comment about the picture on the wall.

4. They bring back memories – This follows up to #3. Once the conversation starts, those pictures will bring back memories. They take you back in time to when those events happened. “Remember how great that cake was on your birthday?!” You’ll remember the food, the atmosphere, the happy times! They’ll take you back to when you graduated school, how amazing it felt getting that diploma or even the sand on the beach and hearing those waves.

5. Prevents your pictures from being stuck behind your screen – How many albums do you have sitting on your online gallery? And how many of them do you remember are there? Or has your online service been discontinued without notice. The more you add new memories, the older the others get and you’ll forget about them. When you have your pictures printed in an album, it’s always easy to go back and look at them again.

02

A number of years ago I had been traveling all day and it was 10.30 at night. I was in the basement of the old Winnipeg airport and I was waiting. Waiting for what I don’t remember, but waiting none-the-less. As I looked around the room there were large Black and White architectural prints on the wall of downtown Winnipeg. I was intrigued and began to explore the walls as I got lost in the images.

•Strong
•Sturdy
•Classic
•Heritage

These were the messages that the images conveyed on the walls of this large room. I was in the basement of the Airport in the City of Winnipeg in the middle of winter, but at the same time I was not. I was exploring the city, my mind wondered where these images were taken. These were some of the ideas going through my head. The arrivals area at any airport can; with images, set the tone for your reaction to a new city. It highlights the good, the exciting and the beautiful about the place you are about to explore.

Airports deal with arrivals and departures all the time and use images to set the tone of your experience. As people come and go from your office or business, what tone are you setting by what is on your walls.

29

The bells are starting to jingle…

…and we are counting down the days when St. Nick crawls down the chimney on the eve of the 24th!

We want to remind you that there is still time to get your orders in for mini-accordion albums and press-printed cards.

The mini-accordions make sweet gifts for mom and dad, the grandparents, the aunties and uncles who live afar and of course, for yourself! A brag book couldn’t be much cooler! Some of us have images of our trips, while others, the grand-kids, new born babies, even cats! Sometimes all three in one book!!

All of our cards, whether press-printed or photographic, come complete with envelopes. Upgrade envelopes to a pearlized metallic for added elegance.

Thankfully, December is only just about to start so no one need hit the panic button just yet. Breathe, stay relaxed and know that we are here to help as best we can. That said, December IS right around the corner, which means fewer days to get gifts organized and cards in the mail so with that in mind, note there are exactly two weeks left to get your orders in~

Please take a look at our deadlines blog or the calendar posted on our FaceBook page – “like” us while your at it!

So, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! We know Christmas wouldn’t be the same without it!

01

Once someone sees how cute your baby is, how beautiful your wedding was, your amazing summer holiday/lake/patio pictures are, EVERYONE will want a keepsake. 4×6 prints are a mere .20 cents the entire month of August! Print lots! Process those old rolls of film and get a deal on the prints too! Order on line and BOOM, stack of prints are in your hands before you know it. Give one to everyone you know! Borders, no borders, fancy borders, black and white, colour, sepia, on glossy, matte or lustre, so many ways to enjoy something so small…..and it will never accidentally delete from your phone :)

09

A wise person once observed that “youth is a gift, age is an art”. We undertake our responsibilities with great reverence for the traditions of our craft. After all, we are entrusted with the precious task of preserving your memories and, by extension preserving the visual documentation of our times for future generations.

What does this mean anyways?

What if someone gave you a floppy disk and said it contained 100 years of family history? How would you retrieve it? Can you be sure the information stored on that disk would still be available for retrieval? Would the files be big enough to make prints? Probably not.

So what do you do? We know that traditional, photographic prints are archival up to 100 years. Film, processed correctly, and sometimes not even so correctly is also highly stable over time. For reasons too many to list, most of us don’t shoot film anymore. The stark reality that film is just not as popular, fun, instant, inexpensive… (But I digress. I still shoot film and love it).

The good news is this: we make traditional photographic prints from your digital files. Translate: 100 year archival. 200 years if stored in the dark. Lasting far longer than most technology that comes and goes, such as the floppy disk mentioned earlier. Generations of memories that are there to be found, like a treasure chest filled with gold. Memories made tangible, like touching the past. Who doesn’t want that for either themselves, for future family members, for strangers living in the old family home finding the prints stored in the basement tucked far back in the cold storage?

So maybe I’m romanticizing the notion of the printed image, but I know for sure, whether it’s from digital capture or film I get a thrill when I am given a print of my best friends’ baby, my friends being silly in the snow, or my mom’s flower bed in the bloom of summer.

In our house, we put up the pictures we get and take and savour the moment that image was captured. We see the life that is all around us and don’t have to refer to our computer screens to imagine it.

It’s just so simple. You can put your memories on paper. Just download our Roes online software from the bottom of the web page.

We also process negative and slide film and make prints from them!

I like to have my cake and eat it too. I shoot film, then have it scanned.